The Argosy, Christmas 1912 — page 95: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Pranks Williams KIPPER BIJONAH TANNER was a distinctly angry man when he left the tiny galley of the Gloucester fisherman Rosan; for his brother, the cook, had defied him, not to say humiliated him, before the entire assembled cooking apparatus. “Out dories and set trawls!” he shouted to the crew that had assem- bled soberly forward during the fam- ily cataclysin. The men, judging by Bijonah’s tone, considered that the cook had again won the argument, and jumped at the order. Dory after dory clat- tered up from the nest amidships and went over the side filled with trawl- tubs. From the low deck of the Rosan two men leaped into each, and pulled away nor’east, where the water shoaled, and where the rugged and barren outline of the Nova Scotia coast could be seen through the creep- ing fog. Playin’ with fire to-day, ain’t ye, skipper?” rumbled Pete Elinwood. “This is sure inside the three-mile limit, an’ if the revenue cruiser come along ye wouldn’t have a chance.” “Well,” replied Captain Bijonah, squinting his eye at the disappearing shore, “if this fog keeps up I won’t have no chance of tellin’ where [I am; that’s sure. Besides, I heard that the Penguin had gone south just two days 8r ago, or I wouldn’t be within ten miles of these Johnny Bull waters. Ram- say is the meanest man in the fish- patrol. Why, it was only a month ago he took in the Daisy Bell to Halifax and sold her out of her owner’s hands, when half the crew of the Penguin would swear she was outside the boundary.” “Tf your conscience is satisfied, we are, skipper,” said Lute Schofield. The thrust went home, for Bijonah laid a good deal of store by his con- science, and was always bolstering that vacillating vessel with quotations from Holy Writ—if they agreed with his desires. The last man to go over the side was Bijonah himself and Tom Hodg- kin, the spare hand. They had only one tub of trawl to set, for Bijonah wished, as he expressed it, “ to smell the fish’’—that is, to determine, if possible, by intuition where the slowly moving hosts. of deep-sea. dwellers would turn next for feeding-grounds. For a while they rowed in silence until Tom, who was Captain Bijonah’s wife’s uncle, chuckled hoarsely. “T cale’late you an’ Del had it pretty warm this mornin’, from the sounds of brotherly love in the galley,” he ventured, as one favored chides a king by means of flattery. “ You sure did give it to him!” : sf Comiclsooks. conn